The invention relates to the art of glass chipping which is a very old art that has been practiced in the past mainly by applying a solution of animal glue manually to a glass surface which has been lightly roughened. The glue film is then oven dried until the glue chips off the glass surface leaving a cut chipped glass pattern which resembles somewhat that of a fossil pattern. This results in a very attractive decorative sheet of glass which has numerous applications in interior decorating.
Heretofore, there has not been a fully automated process for producing glue-chipped glass. Typically, the glass is prepared by lightly sandblasting the surface of the glass and then manually applying the thin layer of animal glue solution to the glass surface. Many types of hand scraping devices have been utilized to evenly spread the glue solution over the glass surface. However, it is difficult to control the amount of glue spread on the glass surface to provide a uniform film thickness so that a high quality chipped glass is produced. The pattern thus produced may vary widely from sheet to sheet.
The prior methods have not afforded a process in which glue-chipped glass is produced in large quantities in accurately duplicated patterns.
The use of the nip of a pair of rollers to form a reservoir of a coating material is known such as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,293,067. U.S. Pat. No. 3,116,166 discloses a heated coating roller heated by steam. However, the above are generally unrelated and unsuitable to the process of making glue-chipped glass. Due to the fact that the primary parameter in the quality of the chipped glass pattern is the application of the glue solution, such has always been a manual art and it has not been thought that such could be automated to mass produce high quality glue-chipped glass.
Accordingly, an important object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for the automated mass production of glue chipped glass.
Yet another important object of the present invention is to provide a method for producing glue-chipped glass in which a film of glue solution is deposited uniformly over the surface of glass sheets conveyed automatically.
Yet another important object of the present invention is to provide a method for uniformly applying an animal glue solution over a glass surface in which the glue properties are maintained to facilitate rapid automatic mass production.
Still another important object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus of producing glue-chipped glass wherein the chipping pattern is uniformly duplicated from one glass sheet to another.